It was a great weekend in Olsztyn. I have been mentoring at Startup Weekend for the second time, this time Olsztyn.

What I particularly like about such events is that they are beneficial not only for participants who end up with experience gains, new connections and (hopefully) great time spent but also for everyone involved. During the three days I met awesome people, possibly started a fruitful cooperation, had a chance to see old friends. It's a win-win for everyone.

Due to a change in VAT ruling in European Union (MOSS — Mini One Stop Shop) we are obliged to introduce changes in our payment system. Starting 1 Jan the VAT rate for all digital services (including Wikidot Pro accounts) is based on the location of the EU consumer — the country in which the consumer is ordinarily resident. As a consequence we need to apply different VAT rates, ranging from 15% up to 27%, based on the location of a subscriber.

Despite the new ruling we are keeping things simple. We decided to keep the gross prices same for everyone in EU, regardless of their country of residence. No changes here. Behind the scenes, we apply VAT rates for your country and alter the base net price.

On behalf of the Wikidot Team I would like to wish all of you all best in 2015. May you wikis be full of great content, gather devoted communities and be awesome!

Thanks for the 2014 — the year that was a bit difficult for us. Thank you for your activity on community sites and helping us run unique wiki-related services! But I am always most thankful for each wiki you have built on Wikidot! (except for spammers, sorry.)

We are looking at 2015 to do some great things. We will definitely do our best to keep Wikidot a top wiki platform in 2015!

Anything can be improved. The strategy that (almost always) works is: If something is good, double it. It should be even greater. It applies to rainbows for sure. We are no magicians to control weather for sure, but there is something we can do…

I am glad to announce that we have just doubled storage space for all premium accounts. From now on you can enjoy twice as much space for your uploaded files. The new storage amounts are:

Wow. It was an intense weekend. I have already blogged about the first edition of Startup Weekend Toruń and it actually did happen! And man, it was awesome. How much awesome? Check out this short movie!

Thanks to organizers who asked me to mentor the teams. I really enjoyed it (you can see me in the movie too) and I believe the teams benefited from my experience and tips. I am also happy that Wikidot could support this initiative.

Last Friday I started drafting a new blog post about Wikidot server uptime. Every month Pingdom sends us a monthly report with average response times, uptime summaries for various checks we have. The numbers are always stellar — something around 99.99% uptime with only a few minutes of detected outages.

Friday night, a thriller story

Our infrastructure is pretty stable and resilient, so I was hoping to get 100% uptime on November. Suddenly on Friday evening we started getting various alerts, from Pingdom, CloudWatch and other services. Something was wrong. Wikidot was slow — loading a page could take up to a minute, sometimes pages could not load at all. Pingdom alerts acted like crazy — various wikis went down and up radomly.